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| Event Name | Date |
| DynamicsCon Virtual | September 2021 |
Transcript of Content (Disclaimer – Auto Generated):
[Music]
0:10 well hello there everyone my name is Shawn Dorward i am the practice manager at dynamic consulting i am super super
0:17 excited to be here today to present to you the dynamics con community 10 business central life hacks that
0:24 every end user should know not the only 10 but just 10. so i want to make sure i
0:30 give a big shout out and thank you to everyone who took the time to not only submit sessions but to take the time to
0:36 vote on them look at this great lineup over these these few days how awesome is this to have a virtual event where we
0:42 can all get together and learn cool things so without further ado let’s go ahead and get started
0:50 so as i mentioned today we’re going to be talking about 10 business central life hacks that every end user should
0:55 know we’ll go through them at a little bit of a slower pace if you’ve ever been in my sessions before and uh talk about
1:01 them a little bit uh don’t forget to use the chat over here throughout the session i’m i’m gonna be monitoring this
1:08 throughout we can discuss them at the end and i may even uh be able to answer some throughout so be sure to use that
1:13 so i mentioned a little bit about myself we’ll talk more about that toward the end let’s get right in and talk about
1:19 life hack number one so the first one here is managing new
1:25 features and i think this one is really important if you’re pro everyone is probably aware that microsoft is constantly improving
1:33 business central so both in a wave one roll out in the spring and a wave to roll out in the fall lots of new
1:39 features and functionality right we i think you know that but what’s really interesting about this is when microsoft
1:45 rolls them out they don’t immediately give you them as a as a default option
1:51 so i’m going to search for manage feature management pop that open
1:57 and in here are some of the features that have not been forced into your into your company or your environment in
2:04 business central so if you want to take advantage of these maybe you’re just a little apprehensive you’re waiting for some of
2:09 the bugs to be worked out and that does happen uh and not not too often but it does happen so in order to get those new
2:17 features not all of them but just certain ones that are like a little bit larger that get inserted into the code base
2:23 you have to enable them early as you can see on my screen here there are a few
2:29 in here and they’re going to automatically be enabled when version 19 rolls out which is at the end of the
2:35 year but if i want them a little sooner i have to come in here and enable them so i have my screen zoomed in pretty far
2:42 let me zoom out just a little bit so you can see that for this particular company it’s
2:47 these are all disabled life hack number two in this session is going to be part of
2:52 one of these features so we need to enable it so let’s go ahead and do that so let’s see where is it
3:01 um maybe it’s not
3:06 there it is right there in the middle that was too easy uh check financial journals and background so let’s just go
3:12 ahead in here and we’re going to enable this for all users
3:18 now it’s enabled we get a notice saying that we have to sign out and then back in so let’s do that
3:25 actually i’m going to make sure i leave this page first i’m not sure if you have to just makes me feel better
3:43 and so now i’m logged back into business central let’s go ahead and look at feature management again
3:49 just to confirm that that feature is enabled for all users and it is be sure
3:54 to check that out as new rollouts occur if right from this page you can easily click learn more it takes you to the
4:00 microsoft docs site about what that feature and functionality is all about pretty cool i hope you like that little
4:07 tip there life hack number one let’s move on to life hack number two speaking
4:12 of those new features that we enabled background error checking for general journal entries this one
4:20 is pretty cool so i’m going to go back into my finance section and go to my
4:26 general journals notice here on my general journals page i now have this option called background
4:32 error check to select it’s optionally turned on by default it’s turned off so
4:39 what we need to do is edit this list and i’m going to go ahead and turn it on for my monthly
4:45 journal entry and then we’ll talk about what this does so it’s turned on let’s go into the
4:51 monthly journal entry batch and if we turn on our fast tabs don’t forget if you have questions about this
4:57 hit me up in the chat if we turn on the fast tabs here by hitting the
5:02 i over here if yours isn’t on already notice this new fast tab
5:09 journal check so as we’re typing in our journal entries
5:16 you’ll see that it’s automatically every time we make a change it’s checking in the background and looks hey we’ve got
5:21 one thing that’s got an issue so let’s take a look here up still just one right
5:27 out of balance so if we click on that oh account must not amount must not be empty so it tells us as we go through
5:34 the journal entry and in the background checking it to tell us that there is
5:40 something going on now we have two it says hey it’s that one is out of balance and i need a gl account knucklehead uh
5:47 that’s checking for errors in the background um while you’re doing general journals you can turn it on and
5:53 off like i said but what’s really cool about this is that you can click the the error messages and immediately see them
6:00 yeah pretty cool hope you like that give me a thumbs up in the chat if you like that number three
6:06 drag and drop dock attach now let me let me start out by saying this
6:12 first of all if you’re not aware there’s an a marketplace or an app store called
6:17 appsource for business central and all things in dynamics and you can access that directly from in
6:24 uh in business central it’s extension actually let’s go to extension management
6:33 in extension management kind of talking about this a bit more globally here’s a list of all of your extensions
6:39 but if i wanted to shop around or i know that there’s one i want to add on my system now i guess it would be pretty
6:46 um fair to say that i would recommend you check with your partner your trusted microsoft partner uh to at least let
6:54 them know that you’re considering or that you’re going to install this they might they might be aware of gotchas uh those kind of things or at least just
7:00 to keep them in loop and keep that partnership and tight in place so extension marketplace let’s come in here
7:11 and in here is where i can shop for all of the extensions out there now there
7:16 are some that are free like legit free um and there are some that are free trial um and there are some that you
7:24 know you’re just gonna have to you have to buy uh for business for business central this is
7:31 let’s see let me just search for this is by insight works and it’s called dock extender
7:38 right here and what this free add-in extension
7:44 does is it allows you on records instead of
7:49 having to um pick the file to attach so now that’s ex that’s
7:56 installing um instead of asking let me go into vendors let me get myself
8:02 organized here if i wanted to attach something to the vendor let’s say i want to attach a w9 to the vendor if you
8:09 didn’t know you could do that that’s over here on the attachments now the behavior that you’re looking at now is
8:14 with doc extender a free insight works add-in it does not cost anything
8:19 it’s very secure very safe it’s a great product it’s to me it’s a must-have because now i can just simply drag and
8:26 drop from an email into there and it uploads it to that record so it says hey
8:33 uh oh i didn’t configure it yet because i just installed it oh by the way i’m glad it did that because i wanted to let
8:38 you know that these are going to be stored on your sql database in your in your business central tenant or
8:44 optionally you can point this to sharepoint so as you drag and drop it’s also uh it’s putting on your sharepoint
8:49 site which i think is pretty cool all right so now we got that
8:55 let’s go ahead we’ve attached it here it is we can preview it naturally that’s going to open up
9:02 open up that w9 i can delete it if i need to just by clicking on the three dots here and delete it i can have
9:10 different versions of this so imagine a scenario in this case where the vendor’s address changes and
9:15 they send you a new w9 so you can kind of archive one and keep the others there
9:21 and that can be on transactions or gl accounts if you want to attach the excel file that you
9:26 use to create your reclass entry pretty cool i think that’s a must-have i would install it in my tenant without
9:32 blinking an eye there may be others out there who do the same thing i just tend to use the one by
9:38 insight works uh because i i’ve worked with them so much and i trust them and their products
9:43 if you know of another one that does this or something different let me know in the chat and we could chat about it after this session’s over
9:50 all right life hack session or excuse me life hacks number four
9:55 workflow now i’m not going to be able to go into the details of a workflow specifically here
10:01 during our time today dynamics con but what i can do is talk about this from a management level
10:07 workflow is within built in business central and i hear a lot of people say that it’s too complicated or that it’s
10:14 not robust enough and you can also use workflow
10:20 with power automate the flow is built uh can be attached to business central
10:25 through power automate um i guess you know i’m wondering if anybody’s using workflow
10:30 let me know in the chat and if you are um what kind so for me an easy no brainer is the example we just talked
10:37 about with the um the vendor and the w9 so
10:42 very very easy internal control create a workflow for vendor creation so that
10:47 sean can’t go into your system and create a vendor um that shouldn’t be created if you know what i’m saying and
10:54 create a workflow around that and have that w-9 even be presented to the approver there’s plenty of options in
11:01 the system for workflow you have to have a workflow approver they have to be set up as well but there’s templates so you
11:07 don’t have to start from scratch in fact you can see on my screen here i’ve got some for finance for general journals
11:13 i’ve got document workflow through the integrations there we go vendor approval workflow real easy and purchase stock
11:20 sales stocks you name it that’s a lot of templates in the system be sure to check it out now you can
11:25 build your own you can customize you can add filters so if you want um you know vendors that are
11:31 in this state to go to this person for approval or something like that you can do that
11:37 so be sure to check out workflow at very least implement it for your vendors as a little bit of internal controls
11:45 in a whole nother world power automates you can also create flows
11:51 which is a workflow engine and i implore you to look in dynamics con here i’m
11:56 certain someone is talking about that maybe mary is talking about that today so check that out
12:03 life hack number five dimension correction this just came out
12:09 in the spring this is one of those changes that i think everybody should just be made aware of you may not use it it’s not for
12:15 everyone admittedly i think that there are reasons why maybe some folks wouldn’t use it
12:21 but it is a very good change to allow someone the ability to modify the
12:27 dimension that a gl level transaction was posted to
12:32 so we’ll go ahead and take a look at that in over here in business central i’m going to go to the chart
12:39 let’s see i’m going to go to my checking account which is looking like it’s doing excellent
12:45 these are my transactions in in my chart and so what i can do is
12:50 let’s say this particular transaction is not posted to the right dimension
12:56 which i don’t have on here okay so what i want to do is go under entry
13:02 and correct dimensions so correct dimensions going to open up
13:08 this change is attached to that transaction i can give it a description hey i talked to sherry she said it was
13:15 it’s okay it’s a mistake whatever you need in my case i don’t have a dimension
13:22 currently set up so it’s not just for those transactions that
13:27 originated with a dimension it could be oops i forgot have you ever done that
13:33 i feel like somebody has so i’m going to go ahead and just pick my new dimension
13:39 now what happens here is this gets this change gets loaded into a job and the job queue and runs and when it runs so i
13:46 can run it now so mine is the earliest start time is 10
13:52 pm so i want to choose to just run it immediately that’s another little tip there some folks think that it has to
13:59 sit in that job queue and then they’ll go to the job queue and manually run the job when i say someone i don’t know who has
14:05 done that before but that little box up there that little ticker box run immediately so let’s run it
14:12 successfully run let’s go back into our entry and history of dimensions and you can
14:17 then see that hey i have an audit trail where i made a change from no value to this value i
14:23 think that’s pretty cool that’s brand new as a spring this year i think it was spring this year and you
14:30 can immediately start using that i think that’s pretty cool what do you think do you like it do you love it wouldn’t use
14:35 it think it’s a bad idea i’ve heard some people say they think it’s a bad idea but you know
14:40 until you can have the that’s sort of like reclassing a journal entry at least to me i digress let’s check out lifehack
14:47 number six company hub most companies that i work with nowadays
14:53 tend to have multiple entities within their umbrella whether that’s a shelter of some sort
14:59 real estate entity or something like that and business central as you probably know handles those entities
15:05 quite well what i love about this company hub though is if you have multiple companies
15:10 that you’re using it’s sort of like a great starting point and while i talk about this i want to
15:16 remind everybody that you’re not limited to one tab in business central so it’s a web browser right but you’re not limited
15:22 to one tab you can have company a on this monitor and company b on this monitor
15:27 and be super productive take a long lunch but right from the company hub i can see all of my companies here i can
15:33 see their cash account balances over to purchase invoices etc
15:38 and i can refresh this too so what else i really like about this is it’s a very convenient way just to get
15:45 to that company so i clicked on cronus usa it’s going to open a new tab
15:50 just the end user experience that i want leaving my other company open in the other other tab
15:56 and there i am right in that company so that’s company hub um there’s a different brand a different
16:02 version of that that um maybe about a year or so ago i’m not sure when was it if you know when that
16:08 came out hit me up in the chat let me know i think it was last year um but not many
16:14 people are using it i think it’s a great starting point life hack number seven let’s check this
16:19 one out what do we got oh very important so recently i was working with a customer who had made some inventory
16:26 changes in their production environment and when those changes were made it was
16:31 quickly realized that it was an error but it affected many transactions very
16:36 very difficult to sort of undo with a journal entry a lot of inventory adjustments needed to be made as a
16:43 result however i want to make you aware or make sure that you’re aware of the restore
16:49 option that is is just part of your environment your install of business central you get up to 30 days and i’ll
16:55 talk about the up to in a minute of point in time restore availability you can restore it to another
17:02 environment in your to on your tenant you know because you got tenant environment company right that’s sort of
17:08 like a hierarchy you can install it to restore it to a sandbox
17:13 without calling your partner if you have access to the admin center that’s an option in there and if you
17:18 don’t probably somebody in your it department uh should and if you don’t maybe you’re a smaller company you need to reach out to the partner i’m sure
17:25 they could do this quite easily the up to 30-day part is the one that i really
17:30 want you to be aware of because around the time when the when the bigger waves happen in the spring
17:36 and the fall when the major and minor version change with the combination of the two change
17:42 the restores only available back to the point at which that change was made so if your system just updated yesterday
17:51 you can only restore back to yesterday it’s a little bit of a tricky situation
17:56 during those times i have it on my calendar just to do a restore uh we schedule our updates um so
18:03 and i do i do a restore to a separate environment to keep that copy of it available and that might be a little
18:10 side trick there too as well um and like i said you can restore to production or
18:15 a sandbox that’s in the admin panel if you don’t know what the admin panel is maybe you don’t have access to it uh and
18:22 don’t sometimes there’s a good reason right so find out who does and and then you know
18:29 who your restore restore point of contact is that’s in the admin center we’ll go in there in just a minute
18:37 life hack number eight copying and pasting into general journals journal entries
18:43 so maybe everyone’s aware of this maybe
18:48 and i say that because i was recently working with a customer who kind of was a little frustrated
18:53 at how long it was taking the key in this particular journal entry and she was re-keying it
18:59 in from excel and i just happened to be part of that conversation and backed the conversation
19:06 up a little bit and showed them um the copy and into copy and paste into
19:11 journal entries and naturally that is part of an implementation training those little uh
19:17 fine nuggets of functionality this was a newer person and no one really showed show them how to do it so i thought i
19:23 would make sure that everybody’s aware of it here real easy to do you can make this part of your journal entry file
19:28 i’m going to account myself and i know it’s a hard habit to break i keep
19:34 copying excel file save it as you know august 2021 and save it save it as
19:39 september 2021. you can keep this as like just a tab in your excel file that properly lines up with the layout
19:47 of your general journal window um in in business central so if i go into
19:54 my monthly here let’s see so what i mean by that is if i have
19:59 extra columns in here i need to make sure i have the extra columns over here in in my excel file as well
20:06 so i’m just going to copy these i’m going to drop this out maybe i’ll make this 100 if something make it obvious
20:14 and i’m just going to copy these four i’m going to go over to business central i’m going to select all these i’m going
20:20 to use my shift and down arrow to do so i’m a keyboard person so then i’m going to do control v
20:25 and what to paste and so now it’s going to paste those four records over top of this in here
20:32 which is pretty handy i mean it’s quite handy actually and now certainly there
20:37 are the other options of editing in excel and you can certainly do that under edit
20:42 in excel here let me pin this so i can take this and move this into excel modify the the data
20:50 directly in excel and then publish it back um into into business central but a lot of times
20:56 accountants are doing a lot of analysis in excel reconciliation etc so the end
21:01 result is in excel anyway so you’re gonna have to copy it from your file into the edit in excel and
21:06 then publish it so to me it’s almost like why not copy it from excel and just paste it in business central uh
21:13 do you use that do you like it let me know in the comments i use it it’s a little quirky i have to admit but the
21:18 keyboard helps make things a lot easier let’s talk about life hack number nine
21:24 that’s a little trippy filters uh wild cards and filters another
21:30 another end user experience brought to you through the magic of dynamics con and share it as a life
21:36 hacks here um it’s not that we’re not that folks aren’t
21:42 learning this on an implementation but if you’re not using it often or perhaps you’re new
21:47 you don’t know uh the filters and the wild cards are pretty cool so i’m going to go into just a list
21:54 and i’m going to turn my filter on right here so here’s my list of transactions that make up
21:59 my 10 100 account and it’s filtered by that right there so maybe what i want to do
22:05 is i want to get everything from uh maybe i’ll use um
22:12 let’s see i use document date or posting date excuse me and i want to get everything
22:19 from april 1st 2019 through april 30th 2019. now that’s
22:25 going to be arranged that dot dot is from that this to that and that works
22:31 just as well in in
22:36 non-date field so let’s do description um we can use
22:43 uh the contains let me jump over to my cheat sheet here uh let’s do pipe we’ll use that for
22:50 another one so ah strike let’s do that so if i want to say
22:56 any it starts with anything which is the asterisk but somewhere in there is the word up and ends with anything
23:02 there we go if i want to make sure it starts with first but ends with anything
23:09 else there we go and the same i’m just going to clear
23:14 that so we can get another example we’ll do wide it starts with wide and ends with anything else i can get them
23:21 pretty easily now think of a scenario a lot of times these are amounts right so
23:28 we’re looking for a dollar amount and so because of a dollar amount we can say
23:33 you give me uh make sure i’m in the right filter
23:38 let’s go to amount and i’m going to say greater than
23:44 or less than 100 so now i’ve got everything less than 100
23:51 dollars if i’m looking for um maybe exactly minus 995 i could just
23:59 type that in the filter but for wild cards we can say
24:04 from minus a thousand to zero
24:10 pretty cool that’s a little bit about filters there’s also pipes so let me show you pipe
24:15 and pipe we can use on um
24:21 pretty much anything i’ll say fabric ham or use description so fabric cam
24:28 got to make sure it’s typed perfectly pipe or which is in or node publishers
24:34 and if you type it properly whew i did i’m surprised actually um
24:40 you can use the pipe as an or you’re not limited to one i could put another one in there so a nice tip there is if
24:45 you’ve got a few like 15 things or something like that use some formula magic in excel
24:50 to build up that uh value that you copy and paste in there and naturally uh greater than less than i think i
24:57 showed you but there’s two single quotes if you want to get an empty return to empty i think that’s important
25:03 so in this document type this is a little bit of a trick too
25:09 you can check oh that’s not a good example let me do department
25:15 let’s do department code department code there it is
25:21 that’s a drop down as well but we can do single quote single quote tab and that’s
25:28 going to return what there when there is no value in there notice i said single quote single quote
25:34 not double quote i don’t believe that the double quote works nope the double quote does not work so
25:40 it’s single quote single quote returns where there is no value in that field uh
25:46 for that um for that search in that wild card okay let’s move on life hacks number ten
25:55 all right last one here uh let’s see duplicate vendors or customers hmm
26:03 very very good so this particular one imagine a scenario we’ve got two three five vendors who are all really the same
26:10 but you just kind of tolerate it because well there’s not really much you can do about it and you don’t want to delete them or
26:17 have somebody purge them so but there is a combiner available and the way this works
26:23 is you want to if you have multiple vendors you want to combine what you want to do is start on the vendor
26:30 that you want to be the destination where you want them all brought to
26:36 uh if that makes sense so i’m going to go to vendors and i don’t have two real duplicates but
26:42 i’m going to open up i’m going to combine sean’s cool company um and
26:48 bring everything from first up consultants so i’m going to go into this vendor and i’m going to say
26:55 actions functions merge right at your fingertips i know actions functions
27:02 merge sounds like an adam sandler skip uh anyway merge with we’re going to open up
27:07 the merge window and we’re going to pick which one we want to merge this with and i’m going to
27:12 say first up consultants and what that’s going to do it’s going to evaluate all the records
27:19 all the history everything in the system and let you choose if you want to exclude certain things i’m just going to
27:24 let mine do that work and basically merge those together
27:29 so that all of the history and information with the one vendor is now part of the other vendor so a little bit
27:36 of of time saving there let’s take a look if see if we have
27:42 um an example and that may take a little while which is why i have these screenshots in here for that
27:48 for you now we still have a little bit of time let me check we still have a little bit of time which
27:54 is awesome so i have a bonus life hack actually if you’re good little boys and girls there are two uh bonus life hacks
28:00 so let’s talk about the first one here which is change posted description again this i think is a handy little thing
28:07 that not everybody is aware of by the way this is loaded now i can go ahead and run it i’m going to abandon that right now
28:13 we’re going to go into our posted transactions at the general ledger level so let me go back into my chart of
28:19 accounts i’m going to go into an account and right here on this window let me tuck this away
28:25 right here in this window is our description and if i try to click in this right now i can’t change that these
28:31 are posted transactions you might feel like well that makes sense i can’t i can’t change them right so
28:37 let’s see how we do this if we click on edit list now it opens up and we can change
28:44 certain things see i can’t change the amount but i can change the description
28:52 so i’m just going to say new description but i thought i was
28:57 did i not type it there we go i didn’t type it told you it was terrible keyboard new description
29:02 boom now i have that saved and i could change the posted description
29:08 nice little tip i think that’s super cool and be sure to charge that out do
29:14 you use that do you think that’s like a you know an audit no no maybe uh maybe so make sure you use security controls
29:21 to protect who can and who can’t make that change and our last bonus life hack here today
29:27 is something that i think you should make sure when you get back to your office that you check out make sure you check with your team or your partner and
29:33 make sure that someone is added in the admin center as a notification recipient
29:39 this is really important it’s pretty it’s pretty helpful through the upgrade
29:45 process i will tell you um and what this is and this is the admin panel right here this is notification
29:52 recipients you just add one or multiple people to this and they’re going to get an email from
29:59 microsoft when certain things occur and so let’s talk about what some of those examples are
30:07 first one here is when a rollout is coming your way um if you
30:13 want to know that a rollout is coming instead of waiting for somebody to find it on twitter or you know your part you
30:19 hear from your partner uh you can find out directly from microsoft when it’s available and then take that next step and go schedule uh your upgrade at the
30:26 for the right date so you get whoever’s on that distribution list and that notifications list gets these emails uh these
30:33 notification emails everyone that i’m talking about here and there’s a few good examples so this
30:38 is an easy one and then another one
30:44 is when your system is updated so you get alerted hey your system has been updated um not so bad and also when
30:51 here’s a nice little link to get a release notes uh an idea what the release notes were
30:58 how about the the ever important if your system
31:03 failed to update now you might know that if you log into the admin panel and purposely look but
31:10 this notification gets sent out if it fails microsoft does a really good job of listing the errors in that email
31:17 hopefully you’re working and being proactive to get the
31:24 release notes and and try the upgrade on a production sandbox environment because
31:29 you know you can do that you can do that earlier in the sandbox then you can then you do in production
31:35 then you can reschedule if you make the fixes um or if microsoft has trouble
31:42 they’ll let you know that they’re pausing it so if you think you’ve scheduled it for friday but they pause them on thursday and don’t restart them
31:48 they’re going to let you know um and you can see more information about it or when they reinstate that rollout they’ll
31:55 notify you just like in this email here and that’s it ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for your attention during uh
32:03 life hacks 10 things every end user should know about business central my name is sean dorward i hope you enjoyed
32:08 this session i look forward to seeing you over in the chat thanks again for supporting dynamics con and the user
32:13 group community [Music]
32:23 well hey there john how are you hey sean how are you pretty good pretty
32:28 good well how about it dynamics con fall well let’s just call it um octo or
32:36 september 2021 day number two what do you all think of that uh what’d
32:41 you think of that life hack session there the 10 not the only 10 john it’s very important to remember there’s many
32:48 more things but what do you think of those tips was it a life hack to say don’t settle for 10 at least 12.
32:55 yeah yeah very very true um i hope everyone’s having a great morning i know there were some questions a lot of a lot
33:02 of traction in the chat you know um there was some some help from others as well so did you have
33:09 any questions that you’re able to capture from from the discussions there yeah i i was trying to keep up at the
33:14 end and maybe if we go a little bit in reverse but um there were a number of questions kind of on on the wild card
33:21 piece seem to be a pretty popular topic and some of the other filtering that was there
33:26 so i was trying to see if i know some people are helping answering so that’s awesome great community involvement
33:33 one was around if there’s any special characters can you enclose that in quotes
33:40 do you know the answer to that one sean or you know kind of how to deal with if there’s some of those special characters
33:45 in there not off the top of my head i mean i think just you have to be careful because some of the special characters
33:51 are wild cards themselves so i’d look to either test it myself to be sure but it
33:57 if there’s anybody in the chat who has some feedback on there love to hear that i actually didn’t know about the at
34:04 uh symbol being a a to uh flag to mark the case insensitive so um
34:10 my mission to learn something new every day is already finished here at 9 a.m 9 30 a.m eastern time uh so thanks for
34:16 that um yeah so not really straight up to test it myself but looking to hear from others as well
34:22 all right um awesome so look down the list here
34:30 um i think earlier so um thanks to mary as well so you kind of uh
34:36 both uh kind of had a premonition there that she’d be answering some questions i think but mary was helping answer some um so just
34:45 one maybe if if you wanted to spend a minute or two um she kind of said she’d love to hear some of the pros and cons
34:51 of the dimension correction and you mentioned you fell in the middle do you want to
34:56 maybe mention one of each of those or some thoughts around that yeah yeah for sure so first of all uh
35:02 thanks to mary for for participating in the chat and helping others as well check out mary’s session i think it’s
35:08 today um she’s gonna be talking about power automate and workflows from that perspective um
35:14 so the dimension correction you know there there probably is a little bit of a debate over because as as an
35:20 accountant or someone who is um you know kind of in that mindset there’s
35:26 there is a a a link that exists between things on the general ledger and the
35:31 subsidiaries and we like to have those things in a perfect world always reconcile
35:38 so no different than the kind of forgiveness we give ourselves when we
35:44 post journal entry re-classes that’s how i think of this dimension correction
35:50 it’s one of those things that i wouldn’t rely on as my go-to method if you have
35:55 to reclass it using dimension correction i think you have to stop
36:00 collaborate and listen no or in the name of not sure but you have to stop and really say do i need to change a
36:06 business process upstream so that i don’t have to consistently make these corrections and you want to
36:12 make sure at least in my mind you want to make sure that those are um the exception dimension corrections just
36:18 like reclasses are the exception not the rule so if you can automate it in a subsidiary that’s probably the best way
36:23 to go yeah i guess i’m just chiming in a little bit to my mind some of the dimensions to me are you know kind of
36:30 the the direct extension of the gl and in the accounts that are in there and some are more tracking so i’m more
36:36 comfortable seeing corrections made on some and not on others depending on how they’re used
36:41 so it sounds like similar thought process there but um definitely kind of the way i start to think about that
36:47 there john that’s a great point and i don’t want to get hung up on this topic too much but you open this can so it another
36:54 element of it like anything else is it really depends on how you’re reporting on this data and how you’re relying on
37:00 it so if you’re making a dimension correction you’re expecting your subsidiary power bi report to get
37:06 updated that’s not going to happen so um you just have to make sure that you’re making the correction in the right place
37:11 and that the expected outcome for your reporting is what you’re is what you’re really trying to do
37:17 all right sounds good i’m trying to keep up with the chat as it looks like it’s still scrolling here too so um looks
37:24 like there was um one towards the end about the dimension correction or sorry i’m on the last topic yet
37:31 around the journal check um and i know there was one earlier um seeing some inconsistencies about it so
37:38 um anything anything you’ve seen at all i know it’s probably environment specific there but
37:44 anything any comments on on kind of um you know maybe implementing or getting
37:50 that consistency with that that check or anything you’ve seen around that on the journal entry check tool so it’s
37:57 new uh so i really haven’t seen inconsistencies myself i’d be interested
38:02 in taking a little bit of a deep dive into that um uh
38:08 yeah so i really haven’t it to me seems quite useful quite helpful um so feel
38:13 free whoever posted that question to reach out to me uh either direct message me on twitter or my emails on the slide
38:19 deck also just mary mentioned in the comment here what about a company starting with no dimension talking about the dimension
38:26 correction that’s a great example i mean if you go six months and you realize you weren’t tagging things
38:33 against a particular maybe you decide you want to have a a dimension code for vehicles or something you know so uh
38:40 certainly retroactively repairing those or cracking the transactions a perfect
38:45 example often when we do implementations uh from the partner perspective
38:50 company customers aren’t quite settled or resolved on what dimensions are and what value they bring
38:57 until they get a little bit of experience under the belt so yes that is a great example of how and why you might
39:02 be able to use that all right awesome awesome so one of the other questions i see a
39:10 recent one posted in there there was a question about restoring um also available from sandbox to production
39:17 so um sandbox 2 production i’m not sure if maybe vice versa says
39:24 well i know there’s some other options there but um do you wanna kind of answer
39:30 is it if if the question is can you restore from sandbox to production using the admit
39:36 panel not that i’m aware of um maybe an option there and i just missed it but i don’t know
39:42 that that’s an option i know in the past i’ve had to work with microsoft directly for that
39:48 um and that was also not in production production like production one it was into production too
39:53 so there might be more to that but um yeah i’m not really sure uh looks like we’re here and in the chat
40:00 it’ll be available in the next release in bc19 so the one just coming out real soon
40:05 interesting all right okay well scrolling through here a
40:11 little bit so you mentioned uh as we were talking about the dimension correction you mentioned um reporting
40:16 tools so um do you want to comment a question around favorite reporting tools to use kind of
40:22 an open question there but you can run with that how you want yeah certainly so um you know i come from the dynamics gp
40:29 space and management reporter or fx was you know something that we used often
40:36 and still use often for that platform so i tend to
40:41 appreciate account schedules for financial reporting at business central there are some things that i really wish it had by the
40:48 way be sure to check out the ideas site you can go to my website lifehacks365.com365.com
40:55 i have a page there with all of the ideas links and and vote up those business central
41:01 ideas for something specifically like maybe making a dynamic header in account
41:06 schedules it’s kind of painful that you can’t dynamically change the header so as the quarters change you have to go
41:12 into mainly changes so i use it i use account schedules for certainly some um and
41:19 tend to just think power bi beyond that and there are some good isvs for reporting in space for now for example um and others but um
41:27 you know power bi definitely is is a place that i tend to frequent
41:33 all right so a couple of housekeeping things here because i see some questions in there um
41:38 somebody was having problems seeing your email address so i’m seeing it on my screen but i might have a little different view
41:44 um see do you want to give that out as well here yeah i think somebody just put it in the chat well you see on the screen there
41:50 that’s my twitter handle uh i realize now that that might be confusing and look like an email address but it’s um
41:56 somebody put that in the chat for my work email address feel free to reach out to me or you can reach out to
42:01 my personal email address which i’ll put in there as well um or stalk me on twitter i you know
42:07 however you want to reach me all right and then there were some questions in there about the videos um i
42:13 didn’t mention that but um just to reiterate i think it’s about a week or so from now we’ll start to see the
42:19 videos posted on the youtube channel that’s right i think tomorrow you might be able to watch today’s video on the
42:26 brella tab i i may be wrong there but but it’s worth looking into i think that’s how it was last in the spring or in in the
42:34 first wave of the year okay all right i did notice a um kind of on a
42:40 different topic there was somebody asking about migrating from quickbooks and allowing an extension in the phone number field
42:49 looks like we just had an answer in the chat as well though that you can just fill that in as an extension from
42:55 there so any other advice on that one sean no you may just have to scrub your data a little bit if if the if the data
43:03 comes over uh with any non-numeric values i think that field is purely numeric so other
43:09 than that it should it should recognize the uh the extension all right and i did see a comment in
43:15 there um similar to that about scrubbing data there were a couple of comments i think around those special characters
43:20 being in fields um i was kind of a best practice if we can not have those special characters in
43:26 whatever field name address um just reporting and different tools does does
43:32 make life a little bit easier um avoid some issues with that so so um i missed who had that as my screen keeps
43:39 scrolling here but um you know definitely good advice there as well right for sure
43:45 all right so you covered you know some some newer things um some things have been out for a little bit here do you have a favorite
43:52 feature um from the last release here coming up that you want to highlight
43:58 sure um so for okay so one one that i talked to customers a lot about and i think it
44:04 just kind of flies under the radar it’s been out for a while a few years at least is
44:10 bulk loading of inventory items excuse me bulk loading of the
44:15 item images so if you have a 100 inventory items and you want to attach an image one image to
44:23 every one of those inventory items that seems like a relatively painful task to
44:29 do through the user interface but there is the feature where you if you name the image the same
44:35 as your item id and then you zip them up into a zip file you can upload them into
44:43 business central and it will automatically attach hundreds of images to
44:49 those items so that’s an old oldie but goodie um and the new the new
44:54 version it’s either out now where it’s coming out is the defaulting of the line
45:01 type on sales order documents and purchase order documents so what i’m referring to
45:06 is when you create these uh purchase order for example and you go you create your header and then you go into the
45:12 details section and you have an option to create that line item whether it’s a gl code an inventory item and other
45:18 things but if you’re frequently wanting that if you are predominantly wanting it to be gl account for example
45:25 you can now set that to default and i think that’s just a small but powerful change
45:31 that’ll help increase accuracy and reduce some keyboard frustration from end users
45:37 all right awesome great information um just doing a little time check i think we’ve got about two maybe three minutes
45:44 left before we we uh get the boot here we could probably talk for an hour or more but
45:50 we gotta give some other people some time um so was there was there any other
45:55 um kind of a favorite tip from a recent release or anything you want to call out here as we just have a couple minutes
46:01 left uh nothing to mind i mean those were sort of my two top mind i was going to get
46:07 them into this presentation um if you’ve ever spoken at an event john i know you you have and you have a session coming
46:13 up here on the gp track you tend to rehearse you put all this good work you want it
46:19 you want to help people um you know get value out of your session and you think you have your timing down
46:26 and it’s inevitable that you either run way over and or you don’t get all your content in or in my case it happened to
46:32 end sooner so thanks to everyone for all the questions and for the dialogue back and forth my emails up there you can
46:38 visit my website lifehacks365.com where i talk about things business central gp power bi
46:44 excel all kinds of other cool stuff um i will be speaking at um dynamics con
46:52 live so this virtual event the parent company of this virtual event is hosting their
46:57 first in person limited limited tickets available it’s november uh i should know
47:04 this it’s november 10th and 11th in anaheim california i’ll be speaking at that
47:10 event in person i’ll also be joining john my colleague john right here in uh
47:17 houston next month for summit north america so everyone thanks so much for joining us
47:23 john thank you for helping me manage the chat and all the questions have a great rest of your morning and
47:28 the rest of time here at dynamics con [Music]
47:43 you
Thanks for reading!
Shawn Dorward
Microsoft MVP, Business Applications
LifeHacks365.com | LinkedIn | Twitter